Knick fans are pissing their pants that Isiah Thomas might just walk though that door once again. Well, today comes word that the Pistons have him on their short list of candidates for the heading coaching vacancy. The others on the list are Mike Woodson, Kelvin Sampson and Bill Laimbeer.
Why anyone would hire this ass clown is beyond me. He had his chance in the NBA and failed so awesomely that people kind of forget what kind of player he was. The Pistons were a mess last year, and the last thing they need is this jackass walking into the locker room.
I am mere hours from stepping into one of the more storied hockey venues in the world as I will be in attendance to see the Blackhawks visit the Red Wings this evening. As far as hockey arenas go, this is one of the ones I'm really most excited for given its relative age, tenant and history. The Red Wings have been among the most well-run franchises in professional sports for the last 20 years and tonight I will get to see, firsthand, one of the more unique arenas in the League.
This will be a fun and appropriate capper to what has been an enjoyable few days in Michigan. This state is actually the only one of the upper Midwest that I had never spent much time in, so not only was I happy to get a taste of Ann Arbor and various staple eateries such as the Maize and Blue Deli or The Cottage Inn, but I've also gotten the opportunity to try what has to be the greatest named beer I've ever heard of in my life, which was of course, a local brew from the city of Detroit known as.... Ghetto Blaster.
I won't even claim to be above the fray on this one. We absolutely bought a pitcher of this beer simply because the name was hilarious and the word "blaster" made me immediately assume this was the type of beer that would be produced by some combination of events on The Wire and at Mos Eisley Spaceport. Whether or not they serve it at the cantina, I can't say, but if Han drank it he would almost certainly be shooting first. The beer itself isn't half bad, though I wouldn't consider it great.
Also, I was only hit on by one man, which, even as a heterosexual, was kind of disappointing. I'm just going to assume they could tell I wouldn't be interested.
Of course, the biggest event so far was my visit to the Palace of Auburn Hills to see the Pistons beat the Nets in an entertainingly high scoring, and defensively nonexistent affair. The Palace is an interesting arena because it's more than 20 years old and yet as the forebear of the modern wave of luxury-suite laden basketball and hockey arenas, it actually holds up very well. It hardly seems as old as it is even though some of the murals are a bit out of date, such as the one depicting the three-time WNBA champion Detroit Shock, who have since moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Also, the ubiquity of dumbest basketball GM alive Isiah Thomas is less than inspiring if you're a Knicks fan, but otherwise the building has aged better than George Clooney in a number of senses. If I had been told it was four years old, I would have believed it.
Of course, 48 hours later, the far more meaningful event of the week, given the fact that both teams are still alive and have won Stanley Cups in the last three years, is happening tonight, and I am pumped. I have no idea what traffic heading into Detroit will be like, but I'm optimistic that I'll have plenty of time to see how the place looks and hopefully scope out that statue of Gordie Howe they've got. And there's also the outside chance that I'll get to see Chicago clinch a playoff spot depending on what happens between Dallas and Colorado, an event that, remarkably, in all my years of attending sporting events would be a first.
Of course, for that to happen, quite a few chips would have to fall into place. Beggers can't be choosers. I'm just happy to be there.
And if they serve Ghetto Blaster on tap, I may just be even happier.
Let's be serious here. About four people read this. Maybe more, but I doubt it. So most of you probably don't know, nor will you know what my thought has been regarding the once-moribund and now flourishing New Jersey Devils, though I've mentioned it a few times. And that thought was this. The Devils haven't had a decent first-round draft position in nearly two decades because, well, they've always been pretty good. New Jersey hadn't missed the playoffs since 1996 and it seemed unlikely that that would be changing any time soon. Some pegged the Devils as Stanley Cup contenders this season and they looked every bit of it the first ten minutes of the year before letting an early two-goal lead slip away against Dallas in a game they'd eventually lose in overtime 4-3.
Then Zach Parise tore up his knee. Then the team was terrible. Then coach John MacLean was fired. Then the team was still terrible.
Ostensibly, New Jersey was awful, having, for most of this season, the worst record in the League, and by a fair margin at that, but then things started to change. The Devils shipped off captain Jamie Langenbrunner and players began buying into Jacques Lemaire's philosophy. Now New Jersey is the hottest team int he League, which left me with a decision to make. Do I lament the loss of what could have been a top-five pick for a team that despite its hot streak is so far out the playoffs are a near impossibility? Or do I throw my emotion behind it and invest myself for what is still an unlikely occurrence?
I opted to wait and see the progress and I decided that if New Jersey could trim a deficit between it and the No. 8 seed, which once was as high as 27 points, down to 10 points by the end of their 60th game, I would start to believe. In New Jersey's last 18 games, the Devils are an astonishing 15-1-2. On Saturday night they played their 59th game, and their third in the last 12 games against eighth-seeded Carolina, and walked away with an impressive 4-1 win.
And just like that, with 59 games gone in the season, the deficit is down to 10.
I'm in.
There are 23 games left for the Devils to make a 10-point deficit disappear, and it's still a tall task despite how well the team is playing. According to Cool Standings.com, the Devils still have just a 1.7% chance of making the playoffs as things stand, but that is still a major improvement over just 11 days ago, when the Devils, despite already playing great hockey and moving up the standings, were given less than a 0.1% chance of reaching the top eight. New Jersey has 54 points, but 32 of them have come in the last 18 games. To continue playing at this pace is highly unlikely, and it may be necessary to pull off the impossible dream, but now that they're this close, I'm jumping along for the ride. And since the Devils' performance clearly hinges on my dedication, this is crucial.
The journey continues tonight in Dallas, where the Devils will be playing those same Stars they faced on opening night, only now they'll be facing them with former-captain Jamie Langenbrunner across the ice, though, it should be noted, Langs is pulling for his old mates. I'm sure most of you are caught up to speed on tonight's game after reading that great preview some guy wrote about it on the interwebs, and you just can't wait to see the Devils drop the puck. I know I can't. This team is real now, they're really in the race and I'm not the only one who thinks it.
If you aren't as excited then you're probably too distracted by the huge trade that broke yesterday. You know, the one in which the Stars shipped James Neal and Matt Niskanen to Pittsburgh for Alex Goligoski. I'm sure you were highly concerned about the potential ramifications of the trade both in the real world and for your fantasy hockey team.
Of course, there's the chance that you were actually thinking about that trade where Carmelo Anthony, finally, at long last, after what seemed like centuries of build up, was sent to the Knicks last night for Wilson Chandler, Raymond Felton, Danilo Gallinari, Timofey Mozgov, several draft picks, cash, Patrick Ewing's retired number banner and the vast French North American territory known as "Louisiana".
Don't get me wrong. I wanted Melo. I'm glad he's here. The Knicks are better today than they were yesterday. But simply put, the 'Bockers got fleeced in this deal, and it isn't difficult to see how or why. Everyone and their mother knew Melo was eventually going to be a Knick. He wanted it, the Knicks wanted it and it didn't matter how many players the Nets were going to offer Denver. Anthony was never going to sign an extension and the deal was never going to land him in New Jersey. Donnie Walsh knew the Knicks had all the cards and wanted to hold out as long as possible to either force the Nuggets to take New York's previous offers or to simply sign Melo in the offseason as a free agent.
But James Dolan is a petulant needy child, and he just had to get his man. And he wanted him now. And as a result, Dolan just had to get involved this weekend and muck it all up. Sure, the Knicks got the man they wanted all along and they have ample cap space in the future to try and get a third big star to power the roster such as Deron Williams or Chris Paul, but they didn't have to give up what they gave up. And perhaps more specifically, they didn't have to give up Danilo Gallinari. Gallo was developing into a quality swingman who could have been a quality player on a championship contending squad next to Amar'e Stoudemire and Anthony. Instead, the roster, aside from these two stars, has been completely stripped bare, and while the Knicks have a blank canvass to work with, they don't have much else.
And perhaps the most frightening thing about this? Despite statements to the contrary, it's pretty clear to just about everyone that Isiah Thomas has been advising Dolan from a far. It also seems apparent that Thomas, the man who single-handedly destroyed the franchise for nearly a decade, might have more influence than Walsh, a man with a proven record of building quality teams. In the end, it seems obvious that Dolan's need for instant gratification and his inexplicable love for Thomas won out. In a bitter twist of irony, the deal brings Renaldo Balkman back to the Garden, a player Thomas inexplicably selected in the first round in 2006 when he was projected as an undrafted free agent, and waves goodbye to Eddy Curry, likely Thomas' worst of several awful moves, whose expiring contract will wind up in Minnesota as part of the deal.
This isn't the first time Dolan's childlike neediness has become readily apparent to just about everyone, and it probably won't be the last. And knowing that New York could have brow-beaten Denver into a better offer for the Knicks instead of giving them everything short of Stoudemire, Landry Fields and the urinal in Dolan's private bathroom is irritating. But in the end, if the Knicks win a championship in the next few years, I, and everyone else, will have forgotten about the pieces that could have been kept and rightly so. In the end, that's all we really want.
And if that doesn't happen, at least I have other reasons for optimism. I mean, come on. The Devils are playing awesome hockey right now.
Friends, enemies, acquaintances, I am no stranger to heartbreak. Both in real life and as a sports fan I have taken my fair share of difficult metaphorical stomach punches -- though fortunately far more in the sports department. Over the years just about all of my teams have had at least one utterly frustrating, deflating brutal defeat that has thrown me into emotional disrepair. To wit:
The Mets -- This team is a special breed with numerous tough losses to swallow since I started paying diligent attention, but the Kenny Rogers Ball Four in Game 6 of the 1999 NLCS, Armando Benitez's inability to strike out Paul O'Neill in Game 1 of the 2000 World Series, the final games of the 2007 and 2008 regular seasons and Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS all bring a special kind of pain with them.
No, I'm not going to be silly enough to suggest that a regular season shootout loss in November in a season quite possibly already down the tubes was enough to top this prodigious list. But it just may be the most embarrassing loss I've ever seen one of my teams suffer.
Yes, you watched that correctly. Ilya Kovalchuk, with the game on the line in the fourth round of a shootout against the equally disappointing Buffalo Sabres, simply had the puck hop over his stick and drift away, costing New Jersey another potential point in the standings. For a team that, with its new $102 million man in tow and several other major offseason additions to boot (Jason Arnott, Henrik Tallinder, Anton Volchenkov), was expected by many not just to be competitive, but to take aim at a Stanley Cup this moment has represented everything that has gone wrong in about three seconds of non-action.
This muffed shootout attempt has epitomized a tremendously disappointing year in downright comical fashion. Now, of course, the season is not over. In fact, it's not even a quarter of the way over. But the Devils, tied with Edmonton and the NY Islanders for the lowest mark in the League have quite a bit of work to do to make their way back in the playoff discussion. And they're doing so without their best all around player for three months.
Now, to say this is not what I had expected is a dramatic understatement, and as I watched last night in the office, I simply dropped my head into my hands in a way I hadn't done since Carlos Beltran let strike three for Adam Wainright go by without a swing in 2006, but there is plenty of time for New Jersey to make a move and salvage a playoff run. After all, in the NHL all you need to do is make the postseason. Once there all bets are off. But the disenchanting thing is not that the Devils are in this almost inexplicable funk, but that they show very few signs of actually breaking out of it.
I won't lose hope yet, but to put it mildly, reasons for excitement are starting to fade away as the season progresses. The only thing that truly reassures me is that with the Devils' 15 games behind them, they still have 66 left to play. And that looks like an awfully large number at first glance. For now, I'll cling to that.
When I perused my twitter feed this morning an interesting thought came to mind when I saw this tweet from @TheHappyRecap noting that of the four New York sports teams he follows, the one that had a starting wide receiver accidentally shoot himself in the leg while wearing sweatpants was probably the least embarrassing. Because I went to sleep fairly early last night, it was after this that I saw that Francisco Rodriguez had gotten himself arrested last night after apparently taking a swipe at his father-in-law at Citi Field following the Mets 6-2 loss to Colorado.
The only way to understand how Isiah Thomas could have been in charge of the Knicks for so long is to assume that he must have had some sort of dirt on completely inept Knicks owner James Dolan. How else could we explain the recently embarrassing news that New York was bringing Thomas back into the fold as a consultant just two years after he completed running the 'Bockers into the ground? Naturally this didn't go over well with most of the fan base, and fortunately for all of us, NBA bylines deeming the deal a conflict of interest with Thomas' day job as the head coach at FIU have saved us all from those best laid plans.
But, like I said, this isn't just about the joke-a-thons that are my favorite teams. The Jets, Rangers, Nets and Islanders, a team once nearly purchased by a man with no money, have all had more than their fair share of misery both on the field and off over the past few decades.
So as I sit here, I'm going to make a rare plea to my four readers and ask you to submit some comments and ideas. Of all the teams, not necessarily in New York, which has had it the worst?
If you're a pained, suffering fan, you'll know what to do.
The dull box of Brendan Byrne Arena has played a much larger role in my youth as the first home of my New Jersey Devils, and likewise Madison Square Garden for the New York Rangers, but remarkably enough, I had actually made my first visit to the Byrne a month before that fateful loss to Toronto, when I went to see the Devils’ co-tentants, the New Jersey Nets. My first professional basketball game was on November 11, 1995. That morning I was playing in a pee wee football game in Summit, New Jersey, when a parent of one of my teammates offered my father their tickets for that night. I had never been to an NBA game before, so I was fairly excited, but despite that, I remember shockingly little about the game itself.
The Nets were playing the Sacramento Kings, this much I recall, and the Nets won by an 86-84 score as the Kings fired up a three-point shot at the buzzer that bounced off the rim. The more impressionable aspect, however, was the horrific weather that night. The Meadowlands of northern New Jersey are a large flat area where wind can pick up and wreak havoc, which has often been an element of difficulty for punters when the Giants and Jets play across the parking lot. On that particular night, when there was a massive thunderstorm, my father, my friend Matt Nedostup and I sprinted from the arena to our car, at one point on the trip seeking refuge behind a parked 18-wheeler as a break from the swirling winds. By the time we were once again under a roof we were completely soaked.
Much of the in-game experience that night is a total mystery to me. What I remember of the arena itself has long been pounded into my head by my many trips there to see the Devils, and the inside feels fairly similar except the center of the action is wood rather than ice. I’ve only been to a handful of Nets games in my life, though a game in 2003 between the Nets and Pistons does come to mind. The Nets were a double casualty of both only a scant interest in the NBA in my childhood and the fact that when I finally did get sucked into professional basketball, it would be the Knicks that I’d call my team.
This was a bad decision. I first paid attention to the Knicks in 1994 during their seven-game loss in the NBA Finals to Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets. I rooted for them and remember watching Patrick Ewing standing on the scorer’s table and soaking in the cheers after defeating the Indiana Pacers for the Eastern Conference title that year. But I also liked Michael Jordan and the Bulls. How could you not? I wasn’t the most enthusiastic follower -- really I was mostly a fan of the legendary NBA on NBC theme music -- and didn’t really settle myself as a fan of a particular team until 1999. The first half of that season had been cut short by a lockout, one of many monetary squabbles between two different sets of rich men that rarely get any sympathy or understanding from the public.
In reality, collective bargaining agreements do broach a number of serious issues and determining how to divide the pain is no small matter.
By the time the playoffs rolled around for the shortened campaign, the Knicks snuck in as the No. 8 seed, and did so as a fairly different group from the one that made the finals five years earlier. John Starks was gone in favor of the energetic and controversial Latrell Sprewell, likely the biggest difference between the two teams. Sprewell was so deemed controversial because in December 1997 he had been told by P.J. Carlesimo, his coach with the Golden State Warriors, that he needed to “put a little mustard” on his passes.
Sprewell responded by choking Carlesimo.
Sprewell wouldn’t play again for 14 months until the Warriors dealt him to the Knicks at the start of the shortened 1999 season. With Spree, a self-described changed man, providing energy off the bench while Larry Johnson and Allan Houston created from the perimeter, the Knicks stunned the NBA with a remarkable postseason run that saw them get past the top-seeded Heat on a late runner by Houston in Game 5. New York was only the second No. 8 to advance to the second round, after the 1994 Denver Nuggets, but they would be the first to reach the conference finals after a sweep of the No. 4-seeded Atlanta Hawks.
One round later against the infinitely clutch Reggie Miller and the hated Pacers, the Knicks would become the first No. 8 to reach the NBA Finals in a dramatic six-game series that featured Larry Johnson’s miracle four-point play in Game 3 and forever cemented Sprewell’s place in the hearts of Knicks fans. The Knicks would fall in five games to a vastly superior Spurs team that featured the almost unbeatable frontcourt of Tim Duncan and David Robinson, but my mind was made up.
This was my team. I was a Knicks fan.
For the next decade I would wonder how I could have gone so wrong. While the local Nets would trade for future Hall of Fame point guard Jason Kidd, who led them to two straight Finals appearances in 2002 and 2003, the Knicks would wallow in mediocrity until hiring Isiah Thomas to be team President in 2003, a move with longterm consequences so far reaching and so disastrous that by the time he was forced out in 2008, New Yorkers were wishing they were merely wallowing in mediocrity again.
To recount Thomas’ myriad mistakes and poor decisions is an interminably frustrating exercise in masochism. During his tenure, Thomas traded for former Coney Island phenom Stephon Marbury, a man with a long history of being a difficult ball hog as well as a locker room cancer. Marbury’s greatest accomplishment as a Knick might have been providing comic fodder during a sexual harassment lawsuit against Thomas and the front office when he admitted on the stand that he had lured an intern into his truck for sex. Not to be outdone, Thomas also traded two unprotected first-round draft picks to the Chicago Bulls for Eddy Curry, a vastly disappointing high draft pick with a known heart condition. When asked about how Curry could improve his rebounding once, his former coach Scott Skiles said, “Jump.” One wonders how difficult it was for Bulls GM John Paxson to hide his laughter when Thomas first called up to offer the deal.
The Knicks would be horrendously bad during Thomas’ tenure, and moves to add Zach Randolph and sign Jerome James to a five-year $30 million deal only compounded the pain. James is often forgotten when recounting Thomas’ mistakes, but he may supplant Curry as the most awful. James would only play 90 games for the Knicks in three and a half seasons while averaging a whopping 7.72 minutes per game. At one game I attended against the Milwaukee Bucks, the Knicks were being thoroughly handled when James finally made his first appearance late in the fourth quarter. Much of the depleted crowd cheered wildly whenever he touched the ball and completely erupted in cruel mockery when he actually score a basket.
As one fan yelled from behind me during the next possession, “Give it to Jerome! He’s got the hot hand!”
At another game against the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2007, my friend Bert and I attended fully prepared with grocery bags to wear over our heads. Unfortunately, that night was one of those rare instances when the Knicks actually defeated a team vastly superior to themselves, but we still took a picture for our records, and were asked to pose with the bags on for a photo by some visiting Cavs fans to boot.
While my first Knicks game came after their inspiring run to the 1999 Finals, it was actually before the Thomas Circus did everything short of literally burn down Madison Square Garden to ruin the franchise. It came on January 24, 2002, on a night when I clearly shouldn’t have gone. A junior in high school, I had my AP U.S. History midterm waiting for me the next morning, and after settling in for a night of cramming everything from a different Marbury in Marbury v. Madison to McCulloch v. Maryland, I got a phone call from my friend Jon Weg telling me Bert had given him two tickets to that night’s game. Clearly, the more practical option would have been studying for the exam, but who was I to turn down a gift?
To maintain some foolish notion that I was actually studying, I brought my notebook with me as I walked to the train station and met Weg on one of the cars. I assume my mother wouldn’t have allowed this, but fortunately for me she was at some sort of meeting at the time. When Weg and I sat in the car, I distinctly recall him having a terse interaction with the conductor. While Weg is generally something of a provocateur, this all fell on the conductor. The cost of a round trip ticket at the time was $8.50 and Weg handed the conductor $10 and two quarters, expecting to get two dollars back. Instead the conductor gave him back his 50 cents along with the remaining $1.50 in small coins.
“I wanted bills!” Weg told him.
“Well, you can enjoy your quarters.”
Weg drove home his disappointment by loudly reading the conductor’s number off of his hat and saving it to his cell phone. For whatever reason, the conductor seemed undeterred by the threat of a complaint being filed by a 16-year-old, rightfully so perhaps. Weg never did file a complaint, but as he showed me at a Mets game later that year, he kept the conductor’s number saved for months in case the mood struck him.
Unlike the Nets, this game I remember quite thoroughly. Knicks games at Madison Square Garden, when the team isn’t atrocious, are an exciting affair. The Garden and the tenacious fan base create an atmosphere that is difficult to replicate when you combine both the intensity and the intimacy provided by a smaller arena. On this particular night the Knicks were coming off a dominating win over the Toronto Raptors, and responded by giving the fans a tremendously flat first half against the Phoenix Suns. After the second quarter the Knicks trailed by 18 points and the crowd rained down a deluge of boos as the players went to the locker room. My only joy had come from taunting the Suns’ Bo Outlaw because he had such a peculiar free throw shooting form and the Garden PA announcer referred to him by his given name of Charles.
This was far different from the later years when a poor performance might have been expected. The Knicks had made the postseason 15 straight years and were only three seasons removed from a Finals appearance. The Knicks weren’t in the midst of a good season, but this still wasn’t the team I had been used to watching on TV for the past few years. According to the game story the next day, Knicks coach Don Chaney apparently unloaded on the team in the locker room at halftime.
And they responded.
The Knicks came out blazing in the third quarter and turned the tables with lockdown defense that held the Suns to just 33 points in the second half. New York rallied for a 96-91 win much to the excitement of the gathered crowd. Interestingly, this makes the Knicks the only one of my four favorite North American sports teams to win the first game I saw them play in person. Weg, ever the friendly and bubbly sort, was hugging and high-fiving strangers all around him as the final seconds of the clock ticked away. I joined in the fracas while frantically reminding myself not to leave the history notebook I had stashed under my seat.
I came home and did a poor job of forcing myself to study, or at least I think I did. The academic part of the evening is hazy at this point. But I do remember letting it slip to my math teacher, Mr. Fox, that I had shirked my studious responsibilities for the sake of a basketball team that was 10 games under .500 at the time I decided to go. Mr. Fox was a great teacher, a good man and one of the primary reasons I consider myself to have succeeded so well in high school and later college. However, this time we didn’t particularly see eye to eye. You never spoke out of turn in Mr. Fox’s class, nor did you ever show up late or without your homework done. To be fair, he was only expecting the same dedication when it came to academics from his students that he gave to them. And when I told him I had attended a basketball game instead of studying his silent disapproval was a clear sign of how he felt.
But he was also a Rangers fan, so clearly he couldn’t be right on everything. Moreover, I don’t know how I did on that exam, but Dr. Conlon, my history teacher, never knew as far as I know. And that’s probably a good thing since she wrote me a letter of recommendation when I applied to college later that year. As for Mr. Fox, he must have gotten past my irresponsibility. He wrote me a recommendation, too.
